


Calor

by Harpokrates



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Sickfic, unedited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 12:01:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4834589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harpokrates/pseuds/Harpokrates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snake gets the flu. Otacon tries his best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calor

For the pain and suffering it caused him, Hal was honestly glad he had gone ahead and taken that Japanese 101 class back in undergrad. If he hadn't, he would have had to wait another three weeks for the subs to come out. And wow, did he not want to wait for the subs to come out.

Onscreen, Kira's plans were rapidly coming to a head. He could see the threads of the over-complicated scheme tangling together, right around the throat of "L" Ryuuzaki. The best part was, he totally knew! He had known Light was Kira from the beginning and he still couldn't stop his own death.

Otacon slurped his ramen.

The Philanthropy bunker was the perfect setting to watch his anime. The warehouse was dark, foreboding, and the computer setup was right next to the microwave. His chair was a little less than perfect and his ass was getting numb, but he had augmented that with a few pillows and Snake's lumbar cushion. Even with the ever present chill in the air this far north, he was bundled in enough blankets keep even himself, undisputed lord of 'please turn the ac down', warm and toasty.

The door slammed open, and Old Man Winter made himself comfortable on the ratty couch.

"Snake, close the door, please," Otacon pulled off his headphones and paused the show.

"No, I'm fine," Snake grunted, "I'll just drag your robot parts inside by my-fucking-self, Hal."

He rolled his eyes and extracted himself from his blanket nest. Sliding into his slippers, he shuffled towards the door, and the cold. Snake looked like a Yeti, the way he was literally coated in snow. Hal bit back a laugh.

“What?” Snake glared at him, and a clump of snow dripped off his hair onto the carpet.

"It’s nothing,” Hal held out his hands, “here, let me help.”

Together (well, 97% Snake and 3% Otacon was still technically together), they managed to finagle the box of circuit boards and ROM chips inside the door. Snake let go of his end once they got inside, and stomped the snow off of his boots.

“Snake,” Otacon wailed, sagging under the weight of the box.

“Christ, Hal,” David, it was stunning how quickly he became David once his boots and bandana came off, grumbled, but went over anyway to take the box and dump it on one of the many desks Otacon had scattered around the room.

“Thanks,” Otacon rubbed at the red lines the box left on his fingerprints, then went over to inspect the box. “Ooohh, a Core 2 E6700 processor! This isn’t supposed to be released for the mass market until April; I wonder what those guys were doing with it?”

“Probably designing nukes.” David said in between long gasps of cigarette smoke. It was testament to how long they’d been living together that Otacon hardly noticed when he’d lit it.

Hal snorted. “You can’t design a nuclear warhead with this thing -we had to use a Cray for REX, and even then we still had to manually install a few more gigs of RAM.”

David shook his head and stubbed the cigarette out in the tin ashtray on the linoleum . “I didn’t catch a word of that, Hal, I-”

He stopped suddenly and winced, his hands clutching the edge of the counter for support.

“Dave?” Hal put the cpu -carefully!- back in the box and went over to him, “are you okay?”

“Fine,” Dave waved him off, “just a headache. I think I’m,” he paused and rubbed his head, “I’m gonna turn in for the night.”

“Oh, okay,” Hal mumbled as David stumbled to his room, “I’ll just catalouge this by myself then.”

Well, not that Dave would be much help anyways, but he was the best at finding the little barcodes on the back of the RAM chips. Hal could never spot them because his eyes were so bad. Still, they could always sort them tomorrow. Right now, he had to finish his episode.

\--

Hal was awake and in the middle of making omelets by the time Dave finally woke up and came downstairs.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” Hal scraped at the pan with his spatula, trying to remove the layer of slightly burned egg.

David grunted and started pulling open the kitchen drawers.

“Your cigarettes are with the spoons,” Hal gestured vaguely to the left, “second drawer down, next to the fridge.”

Dave slammed a drawer full of spare magazines shut and pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes. He lit one -thankfully away from the food, and Hal- and inhaled gratefully.

“You sure slept in late,” Hal shuffled the omelette onto a plate, and because they hadn’t run the dishwasher in a while, a bowl, “are you feeling okay?”

“Ahh,” Dave waved his hand, creating little spirals of smoke, “couldn’t sleep.”

For Snake, and he was Snake when he couldn’t fall asleep, insomnia was anything from flashbacks to raging paranoia that kept him checking his guns and staring out into the darkness until the small hours of the morning. Otacon usually stayed up with him when he knew Dave was sleepless, doing computer maintenance and meaningless housekeeping on his desktop set-up. He wasn’t Hal then, and it disturbed him how easily he could switch between ‘Hal’ and ‘Otacon’. It disturbed him even more how distinct those two were.

“Aw, well, I’m sure some food will help you perk up. I made coffee, too.”

“No thanks,” he finished his cigarette and lit another one, “I’m not hungry.”

“Ah, okay, then,” Hal opened the fridge and stuffed the omelet bowl inside, then sat down next to Dave, “I wa gonna go through that box of computer stuff; I could use someone with a set of working eyes, if you wanted to help?”

Dave looked up slowly and rubbed his forehead. "Hmm, yeah, sure."

For the next hour or so, Hal watched as Dave wilted like cut flowers, like the ones he brought EE when she was in the hospital.

"David," he said the third time the man's head drooped down to the side, "you look exhausted."

Dave inhaled sharply and sat up straight, "I'm fine, Hal."

"You don't look fine."

"Drop it."

Hal sighed.

"I'm fine, just a little tired."

"Okay, okay," Hale held his hands up.

Dave coughed, a nasty, dry, hacking thing. He smoked, probably too much, so it wasn't any huge concern, but then he kept coughing and doubled over

"Dave?" Hal stood up and put a hand on his shoulder. David waved it off and stumbled over the the sink. Hal followed and filled a glass with water, shoving it in Dave's hand. He accepted it and chugged the entire thing in one go.

Hal rubbed his back. "You shouldn't smoke so much."

"Lay off," Dave's voice sounded even raspier than normal.

"I'm serious, David, you know it's bad for you."

Dave grumbled and filled the glass again, taking his time to sip at it. The long, smooth muscles of his throat pulsed as he swallowed. Hal forced himself to look away. He opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out a cough drop and the old bottle of Robitussin.

“Here,” he handed the cough drop to Dave once he put the cup in the sink.

“Than-,” he paused to cough violently, “thanks.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Dave grunted in response. David coughing wasn’t an uncommon thing; he certainly smoked enough for it and his poor lungs must have looked like spoiled meat by now. But he rarely admitted that his bad habit was probably killing him, and even went as far as to go outside into the tundra to cough to keep Hal from nagging about his lung problems.

“Hnnrg,” David winced and rubbed his back, “I’ll be fine.”

Dave was essentially a crotchety old man in the body of an exceptionally fit thirty-five year old, but even so, he just got pricklier as the day went on. At noon, it was ‘Hal, turn the heat off!’, then at four it was ‘Hal, turn the heat back on!’. By the time night bloomed over the freezing wasteland they called home, he was ready to march out into that freezing wasteland, start up the snowmobile, and rent a room in town fifty miles away. Cabin fever never got this bad between them, even when they had to hole up in one of Philanthropy’s one-room safehouses in the middle of Canada.

Dave skipped dinner -he hadn’t eaten anything except some bland soup and stale crackers at lunch-, and Hal really couldn’t bring himself to care. If he was going to act like a grumpy child, then he deserved to have hunger pangs wake him up at three am and send him down the hall for whatever he could scrounge out of the fridge and eat cold.

“Night, Hal,” Dave walked back into the main room, his hair still dripping with water from his shower.

“You’re going to sleep so soon? It’s only nine o’clock.”

David shrugged.

“Well, uh, okay,” Hal turned back to his laptop, “sleep well, I guess.”

-

Hal awoke, as he often did on Sundays, around noon, and so twisted in his sheets that it took a full five minutes to extract himself. He felt for his glasses on his nightstand, then sighed, leaned off the bed, and, picked them off the floor. Even that much movement woke him up enough that he couldn’t just roll over and nap for another hour, so he hauled himself up and pulled a pair of sweatpants on over his boxers, and found his favorite, worn, Evangelion long sleeve t-shirt.

He wandered down to the kitchen. Empty. That was… odd. Dave woke up at six every morning, like clockwork. Yesterday was excusable, he had been running on maybe five hours of sleep before a long, tedious mission to secure a drop-off from one of Philanthropy's anonymous backers, but for him to sleep in two days in a row, that was worrying.

“Dave?” Hal called out. No answer. Maybe he was out with the dogs? He went back down the hall, to David’s room. The door was cracked open, and Hal knocked lightly on the doorframe. No answer. He pushed the door open.

Dave was still in bed. He looked like a wreck, sprawled over his bed with deep, dark circles under his eves. Thin slats of bright sunlight stretched across the room, throwing David's face into haggard relief.

"Dave, you awake?" Hal stepped into the room.

Dave's eyes slitted open, little crescents of blue in the dark of his sunken eyes.

"Hal?" He pushed himself up against the headboard. "What time is it?"

"Uh," Hal slid up his sleeve and checked his Gundam watch, "a little after one: one o'seven."

"What?" Dave rubbed his hand over his face. "How long was I asleep?"

"More than twelve hours. Are you feeling okay?"

Hal brushed Dave's lank hair off his forehead and pressed the back of his hand to the man's clammy skin.

"You're burning up, Dave!" Hal snatched his hand away.

David glared mildly at him.

"Sorry," he said, much more quietly, "how are you feeling?"

"Like I went a few rounds with a meat grinder."

"Uh, stay here, I'll go get some ibuprofen and some water and stuff."

"Where am I supposed to go?" Hal heard Dave grumble under his breath as he scurried to the kitchen.

He grabbed the economy sized bottle of generic Motrin, an oral thermometer, a packet of soda crackers, and a bottle of water from the cabinet. Then he pulled out a bag of frozen peas, which only mildly smelled like the freezer and wrapped it in a clean kitchen towel. When he got back the Dave’s room, the man in question was standing on shaky legs, leaning most of his weight on the bed post.

“Dave,” Hal complained, and dumped the pile of medical supplies in his arms on the dresser, “what are you doing up?”

David glared at him. “Going to take a piss, Hal. You wanna join me?”

“Oh, uh,” Hal felt his face turn red, “well, I’ll just stay here then.”

Hal made himself keep busy by reading the ingredients list on the back of the ibuprofen bottle. Dave shuffled back down the hallway into the room about two minutes later.

“Did you know that this stuff can cause stomach bleeding? You aren’t still taking that diazepam stuff, right?”

Dave grunted a negative and dry-swallowed three pills.

“Dave!” Hal frowned. “You know you need to eat before taking that stuff.”

He placed the crackers in Dave’s hand and guided him to sit back down on the bed. After he was finished unenthusiastically crunching his way through the first thing he had eaten in about fifteen hours, Hal stuck the thermometer in his mouth and hauled his legs into bed, tucking the blankets around him.

“Hal, I-”

“Ahh,” Hal interrupted him and pointed to the thermometer. Dave grumbled. Hal picked at his nails.

The thermometer beeped and Dave spat it out.

“I don’t need you motherhenning me, Hal; it’s just a head cold.”

“Just a head cold?”Hal picked up the thermometer with a tissue. “You have a fever of one hundred degrees, Dave. I told you, you should have gotten your flu shot.”

“I don’t like needles.” Hal had never asked what made David so tetchy around doctors, but he suspected that that Doctor Hunter woman had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, it kept Dave from getting anything except a dose of nanomachines before particularly dangerous missions, and he always injected those himself.

Dave opened his desk drawer and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Hal snatched them out of his hand.

“Seriously, Dave?”

“C’mon, Hal, I’m getting twitchy. Just one won’t hurt.”

Hal rolled his eyes. “I’ll go get the nicotine patches.” Before he left, he ran his fingers under the bed, and took the box David kept there, too.

Dave kept a box of probably expired nicotine patches deep in the recesses of their storage room, in the cellar. Hal suspected they were for long stakeouts with a sniper rifle, perched on some rooftop, back when David was a different man, before Zanzibar and Shadow Moses. Nowadays, they just moldered in the basement. Hal cringed and walked, not ran, because running would be like admitting he was scared of Dave’s horrible, dank cellar, and then he would probably be eaten by zombies or something, up the stairs.

“I think we have rats,” he announced as he went back into Dave’s room. David looked at him, eyes bleary and confused. He took the man’s hand and stuck a nicotine patch on the inside of his wrist.

“You just try to rest, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Dave grunted and shuffled down into the blankets.

Hal went back to the living room and finished sorting the box of computer parts into ‘useful’ and ‘junk’. By the time he finished it was dark outside, but it got dark in Alaska around four p.m. Dave was being pretty innocuous; Hal had only heard him get up once or twice to get water and use the toilet. Hal leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

“Dave,” he called down the hall, “I’m gonna make soup.”

No response. Dave was probably sleeping, or ignoring him. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to check.

He cracked the door open and stepped in. The light from the hall was enough to see by, so he stepped quietly next to Dave’s bed. He looked gaunt and worn down. Hal could feel the heat radiating off of his even from this distance. He found the thermometer on the desk and prized Dave’s mouth open, then stuck it under his tongue. Dave’s eyes opened, hazy-like. He looked confused, like the time his tranq gun misfired and hit him -drugged. He tracked Hal slowly as he paced across the room. Finally, the thermometer beeped. Hal pulled it out and stifled a gasp when he saw the number. 104 degrees fahrenheit.

“Oh no no no no,” Hal muttered. 104 degrees was the point at which an adult needed to go to the hospital -you had seizures at 104 degrees. The problem was, they were fifty miles from the nearest town, seventy from the nearest ICU, and they were both wanted men.

What were you supposed to do to lower a fever? NSAIDs hadn’t worked, so what was he supposed to- of course! Memories of spending lazy Saturday afternoons in junior high watching medical dramas in the basement resurfaced through the hysteria.

Otacon pulled Dave’s blankets off and dumped them on the floor, then ran to the kitchen. He grabbed the four ice trays they kept and pushed open the bathroom door. He cracked the ice into the bathtub, plugged it, and started running a slow stream of cold water. Flicking the lights on as he left, he went back to Dave’s room.

Otacon looked at him analytically. Dave was at least fifty pounds heavier than him, and was essentially a deadweight. He knew the vaguest information about rescue carries from when Snake decided he needed to learn, but he wasn’t strong enough to haul Dave down the hall. He tugged at his hair and bit back a sob of frustration. His feet tangled in the blankets and he almost smacked himself. Otacon pulled Dave’s upper body to the floor so he was half sprawled on the bed, as gently as he was able, and placed him on the sheet. His feet followed after. Otacon tied the blanket around his feet so he wouldn’t slide out, and tugged him down the hall. It was slow going, Dave lying down was just as heavy as Dave standing up, but Otacon managed.

The bathtub was half full of cool water, so Otacon turned the tap off. It was more difficult getting Dave into the tub than out of the bed. Otacon grabbed his shoulders and pulled up, and his back strained in a way that he knew would make him sore tomorrow, but he got Dave up. He sank into the water almost up to his nose, so Otacon quickly hauled his legs in and propped his arms around the sides of the bath, so he wouldn’t sink in.

Otacon pulled one of Dave’s eyes open with his fingers. His pupil reacted to light, and he looked at Otacon but there was no comprehension in his stare. He was trapped behind the muddy haze of a fever dream. Otacon sighed and took his hand, feeling for the steady thrum of the pulse in his wrist. He found it, a unfaltering beat beneath his fingers.

Then Otacon sank down next to the bathtub, holding Dave’s hand, and Hal sobbed.

\--

Dave woke up with the sudden realization that he wasn’t in the same place he had fallen asleep. He was shivering.

He lifted his hand to wipe his face, but he had to twist his fingers out of someone’s hand. Who? He sat up, and water sloshed against his chest. Dave blinked a few times, trying to get his eyes to adjust to the bright fluorescent light. He was lying in the bathtub, up to his ribs in tepid water.

“Hal?” He grimaced. His throat felt like someone had raked the insides with a fork.

“Dave?” Hal sat up and squeezed his fingers. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit,” Dave started to pull himself out of the bath, “what happened?”

“You had a fever; a really bad one,” Hal helped him up, soaking his anime shirt in the process, “it broke, uh, around three.”

Hal looked awful, almost as bad as he looked back on Shadow Moses, all terrified pallor and deeply sunken eyes behind his thick glasses. Dave got his feet on the ground and stepped on the bathroom rug so he wouldn’t slip and break his neck. His clothes were soaked and clung to his skin. He still felt woozy, unbalanced, but he didn’t feel like someone had lit a fire in his brain, in-between his lungs. He had had fever dreams before, but trying to remember last night was like running through smoke. He could recall the smell of oil, the screech of grinding metal, the heat on his bare back and the adrenaline rushing through his system because it was kill or be killed. There were snatches of lucidity that lingered in his mind, mostly of Hal.

He grabbed the towel from the rack and roughly dried off his hair, then wrapped it over his shoulders like a cape.

Hal slipped his arms around Dave’s waist and dropped his head onto Dave’s chest. He squeezed, tightly, and made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a whimper.

“Uh, Hal,” Dave got his hands up around Hal’s back and patted his shoulder awkwardly, “you okay?”

“Yeah,” his voice cracked, “I thought you were gonna die. What would I do? What would happen?”

Dave sighed through his nose and returned the hug, pulling Hal to his chest. “Shh, shh, I’m okay.”

“You jerk,” Hal leaned back and glared up at him through foggy glasses.

“Yeah,” Dave laughed gruffly, “I know."

**Author's Note:**

> I realized retroactively that Snake is literally displaying ⅔ of the adult triad for meningitis. Like, hmm, unexplained exhaustion, severe headaches, high fever; if he were in a dorm they would have quarantined his entire floor. 
> 
> The flu sucks; get your shots.
> 
> Also don’t smoke.


End file.
